Technology Support for Relation Work in Video Meetings: The Design, Implementation and Evaluation of SideBar

Distributed collaboration has a number of problems associated with it. One of these problems is the fact that distributed actors have to engage in explicit work to achieve the connections between them needed in a collaboration. The work of creating these connections have been named relation work. Relation work is performed throughout a collaboration, however it is especially interesting to investigate in the context of the video meeting. This report asks the question “How can we design support for relation work in distributed video meetings?”.

The two main contributions of this report are; (i) the design, implementation and evaluation of SideBar - a videoconferencing system supporting relation work, and (ii) the proposal of three guidelines relevant for the design of relation work support.